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Comment by guynamedloren | Hacker News Reader

Cannot explain how much this excites me... but can somebody familiar with the matter please elaborate on the economics of this? How, exactly, do they intend to make money?

I was under the impression (from previous articles) that the raw minerals from the asteroids were worth tens or hundreds of thousands $$, while the process of bringing them to Earth would be orders of magnitude higher (millions or billions). Wouldn't it be more economical to use the materials for space ventures/stations/etc? Or are the asteroids composed of some high value materials that can be hugely profitable?

Edit: this is not to say that the venture isn't utterly amazing - but there does seem to be quite a bit of focus on profit, and that confuses me.

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The raw materials are potentially worth trillions.

Economic growth in China and India has caused a huge increase the the price of many commodities, and economists have been projecting gloom and doom because he future looks to be resource-constrained.

But they weren't taking into account the one million asteroids in the solar system, many of which contain billions of tons of resources each.

This can really reshape fundamental assumptions about the future. Of course, it will happen slowly over the course of decades, and by the time we see results we'll all feel jaded about it.

But tonight I feel positively thrilled.

FTA:

"A single platinum-rich space rock 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide contains the equivalent of all the platinum-group metals ever mined throughout human history, company officials said."

Quick Wikipedia/Google math:

1 cubic foot of Platinum = 1330 pounds [1]

Total platinum mined ever = ~25 cubic feet [1] * 1330 lbs = 33250 lbs = 532,000 oz

Current price of platinum = $1,560/oz [2]

Total value of platinum in an asteroid = $829M

And that's just the one metal, which is not the only thing they're mining. Throw the water in there for the space station(s) and it's not impossible to assume that one asteroid can gross well over $1bn -- we're not talking $trillions yet, but I bet they've modeled this out to make it a profitable venture...

[1] - http://www.gold-eagle.com/analysis/platinum.html [2] - http://www.kitco.com/market/

(of course this doesn't account for the fact that if you suddenly double the worldwide supply of platinum overnight, the price likely won't stay at $1560/oz....but still...)

And that's for a tiny, tiny asteroid.

Wow! I can't believe we've only ever mined 25 cubic feet of plat. Reading your source I'm not sure it's right, "The annual supply of platinum is only about 130 tons" "one cubic foot weighs a little more than 1,330 pounds"

23*1330lb = 13,875kg ever

130tons = 117,934kg per year

"basement of less than 25 cubic feet" Maybe them meant basement of 25 square feet or 250cuft which is still tiny basement.

It's definitely wrong.

According to [1], 614,631 kg were mined in South Africa (which accounts for about 80% of world production) between 2002 and 2009.

Density of platinum = 21.45g/cm^3 = 21.45 * 10^6 g/m^3 = 21.45 * 10^3 kg/m^3

=> total volume mined 2002 - 2009 = 614631 / 21450 = 28.65 m^3 approx.

So that's about 28.65 * 35.29 = 1011 cubic feet, JUST in South Africa and JUST between those years.

Other estimates visualise the total ever mined as a cube of 20 feet per SIDE ([2]), which sounds a bit more like it, given the numbers above - but still feels a little bit low.

[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/minerals/?country=za&product=p...

[2] http://money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm

people screw up "x cubed" and "cubic x" so often....

Well apparently I was very wrong! Thanks for clearing this up. Amazing.

So, for $1BN you could have: Instagram, SpaceX, or small asteroid. Ha!

A billion -- whoa, we're talking Instagram money here.

lulz - I think I'll use "one instagram" instead of "one billion" from now on...

I'm not saying I don't believe any of this (I certainly do), but this whole business has HUGE bubble or even scam potential. Think those damn "moon-plots" but on a larger, perhaps government scale. Imagine some of the poor smaller governments trying to invest in the future only to find out that whoops, our data was wrong and you can only make $500k on that giant rock...

Its more than that. Merely the technologies that will get developed to build such a venture can patented and billions can be made out of them.

Also they are talking of water, that means resources for the next permanent space stations. Building oxygen gardens in space and space colonies. Stuff and resources that require maintaining large space colonies.

Considering projects of such big ambitions, the investments and associated risks we are taking is chicken feed.

The intent is to use the material in orbit. It costs loads of money to send stuff to orbit (e.g. for the ISS) and this could be cheaper, especially for bulky stuff.

Bringing it all the way back to the surface is not worth the energy required.

The intent is to use the water in orbit, but they're saying they'll bring the platinum down here. If you're already in earth orbit, going back to the surface doesn't take much energy.

If we want to move stuff around in space what matters is the delta v or change in velocity. Fortunately since we are de orbiting a satellite, we can use aerobraking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobraking. So we just need to slow down the craft and a make fall with a parachute. If we had to lift the mass off the moon or mars we would have to spend a lot of money. Just getting it to the surface of the earth from orbit is much much cheaper.

But don't you need to spend a lot of money to prepare the material for reentry without losing most of it?

No. You only need to use special technology if you have to limit the g-forces for humans.

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